Quick introduction:Hi I'm Rich. I've been a professional programmer for over 15 (over 25 years if you count my youth), always at a higher level and never been in to hardware, I've never really needed to understand the lowest level. I was a massive Amiga user + fan (still am).

So... recently I booted up my old Amiga 500 and realised I had a simple tutorial for writing games in assembly language. On Amiga Format issue 39 they gave away a free copy of DevPac 2. Fired it up, followed the first tutorial and really enjoyed it. It stumped me as a kid, but now I fully understood it. Over the next few weeks I'll be following the rest of the tutorial. I've also downloaded several books, tutorials and resources for the Amiga so I'm slowly getting to grips with it all.

One of the things I would love to do is write my assembly code on my PC, then some how transfer to my Amiga to speed up the whole process. I'd forgotten how slow it is to work off floppy disks all the time One of the reasons how I stumbled across EASy68k.

Questions:I'm yet to properly get stuck in, I've been doing lots of googling about, but some questions have popped in to my head already which I hope people can help me with.

1a) Do programs written in 68k assembler work on any machine with a 68k processor?

1b) Can I use EASy68k to write programs that I can run directly on my Amiga? I mean, if I write a program, can I open the same file in say DevPac and it will work?

2) I hear about different machines have say different processors to handle graphics and sound, are these handled THROUGH the 68k processor? So do I instruct the main processor to talk to the other hardware, or do I need to write individual programs for each of the processors? And then some how link them up?

3) Can EASy68k be used to write stuff for the Sega MegaDrive (Genesis) ?

So actually I realise that I'm sort of asking the same question, is the assembly language portable from machine to machine?

EASy68k looks great, and a great tool for me to properly get up to speed, really looking forward to starting my own projects and sharing with the community.

1a) Do programs written in 68k assembler work on any machine with a 68k processor?

The 68K code will run on any 68K processor. The trap tasks used in EASy68K I/O are unique to EASy68K.

RetroRich wrote:

1b) Can I use EASy68k to write programs that I can run directly on my Amiga? I mean, if I write a program, can I open the same file in say DevPac and it will work?

I'm not familiar with DevPac. EASy68K supports 68000 only. The Amiga uses 68020 which is backward compatible with a 68000 but contains additional instructions not supported by EASy68K.

RetroRich wrote:

2) I hear about different machines have say different processors to handle graphics and sound, are these handled THROUGH the 68k processor? So do I instruct the main processor to talk to the other hardware, or do I need to write individual programs for each of the processors? And then some how link them up?

The answer to this question depends on the hardware being used. The graphics and sound CPUs run code that is separate from the 68K code. How they get the code to run depends on the hardware configuration. EASy68K uses trap tasks to display graphics and play sound. The actual graphics and sound code is contained in the simulator which uses Windows and DirectX.

RetroRich wrote:

3) Can EASy68k be used to write stuff for the Sega MegaDrive (Genesis) ?

The Genesis used a 68000 CPU. Code for the 68000 CPU may be written in EASy68K. The graphics and sound CPUs used by the Genesis are not emulated in EASy68K.

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